


The Zagrith's Claw

by AVAAntares



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dark, Halloween, Hoix - Freeform, Horror, M/M, Prompt: Cursed Objects, Team Dynamics, Torchwood Fan Fests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27310204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AVAAntares/pseuds/AVAAntares
Summary: Changing fate always demands a price -- and sometimes, the cure can be worse than the disease.(Written for Torchwood Halloween Fest 2020. Prompt: Cursed objects)
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Comments: 9
Kudos: 41
Collections: Torchwood Fan Fests: Halloween Fest 2020





	The Zagrith's Claw

It was night, as the great poet once said, in the lonesome October, in one of the most immemorial weeks Torchwood Three had seen under its present administration. A little of the crisp autumn chill had crept into the air of the Hub, and Ianto Jones, standing in the kitchenette, chafed his hands and extended his fingers toward the heat of the coffee machine. He was grateful that his duties frequently put him in close proximity to a reliable source of warmth. _Two_ sources, if you counted Jack’s superhuman metabolism—though their nocturnal activities weren’t, strictly speaking, in Ianto’s job description.

But making coffee certainly was, and Ianto was preparing the fourth round of refills since lunchtime. The team was working late, as they usually did this time of year: October was always a challenge for the unsung guardians of humanity, as rumors of hauntings and seasonal revelers making mischief were conflated with reports that might ordinarily indicate an extraterrestrial incursion. Yet the rift had been oddly calm this week, and nearly all of their investigations had uncovered mundane causes for the supposed alien sightings that trickled in through their network. It was almost disappointing that more aliens _hadn_ _’t_ shown up to crash a few of Cardiff’s wild costume parties.

Ianto was just adding the cream to Gwen’s mug when the cog door rolled back with its usual fanfare of alarms and flashing lights. Owen strode into the Hub, brandishing a plastic carrier bag. “Well, Halloween has finally kicked off,” he announced to the room at large. “You will not _believe_ where I found this thing.”

Toshiko removed the magnifying visor she was using to work on some bit of microtech and leaned back in her desk chair. “What thing would that be?”

“I hope it’s a package of those miniature candy bars,” Gwen said through a yawn. “I could use a little pick-me-up.”

Ianto added a mug for Owen to his tray and carried the coffees over to the workstations. “I can help in that department. Well—the picking-up, at least. Not the candy bars, I’m afraid, though I can try to get some tomorrow if the shops aren’t sold out.”

Owen plopped the plastic bag down on the corner of Toshiko’s desk, then shucked his coat and tossed it in the general direction of the medical bay before collecting his coffee mug. “Good, I was hoping you had something fresh. I bought a coffee at a petrol station on the way back to warm up, and I’m ninety percent sure it was just a scheme to recycle used motor oil. At least this stuff is potable.”

“At least.” If Owen detected the crispness of Ianto’s tone, he didn’t let on. “So what _did_ you bring back from your outing to the far-flung reaches of Penarth?”

“Just what I was about to ask.” Jack had emerged from his office to join the group. He took his striped mug from Ianto’s tray, and Ianto basked in the expression of hazy bliss that crossed Jack’s face when he sipped the coffee. Jack’s opinion was always more valid than Owen’s, as far as Ianto was concerned—doubly so when it came to his coffee.

Owen picked up the carrier bag by one handle-loop and rattled it lightly. Something weighted the bottom of the bag, but it was impossible to see through the plastic. “I went trick-or-treating. Who wants to put their hand in and see what goodies I got?”

Both women immediately scooted farther back, and Ianto held his metal tray in front of his chest—a sturdy barrier, or if need be, a bludgeon. Jack rolled his eyes at their reactions, but even he didn’t reach into the bag. Instead, he grasped one of the bottom corners, flipped the bag upside-down, and shook it until the object inside thunked onto Toshiko’s desk.

Satisfied that it wasn’t about to jump out and attack them, they crowded closer. “What _is_ it?” asked Gwen.

“It looks like an animal’s foot. Or maybe a bird’s talon?” Toshiko used a pencil to rotate the shriveled three-pronged form in a slow circle. “It’s completely dried out. Mummified.”

“Look at those claws!” Gwen crept closer, fascinated. “It looks like something out of _Jurassic Park_.”

“Looks as though it ought to be clutching a crystal ball or something,” Ianto murmured. Jack looked over and smirked at the suggestion, and Ianto’s ears grew warm. The upturned claws were curved slightly inward, and it really _did_ look like a sphere would fit neatly in the middle, though perhaps saying so betrayed too much of his teenage predilection for low-budget fantasy films. “So, um, where did it come from?”

“A trick-or-treat bag,” Owen said. Jack fixed him with a look, and the doctor shrugged. “Seriously. This afternoon, there was some sort of Halloween shindig for the kiddies in a car park—it’s supposed to be safer than going door-to-door and keeps them off the public streets, I guess, but it sounds bloody awful. Takes all the fun out of the trick-or-treat racket—running around in the dark, blackmailing strangers to give you candy. Anyway, the kids walk around to different stations in broad daylight and collect their candy, and then their overprotective parents take them home to rot their teeth in complete safety. At least, that’s the theory. A concerned mum called the police after her seven-year-old found _that_ in his goody bag.”

Toshiko waved a scanner over the claw and tapped at her keyboard. “There’s some residual rift energy, but I don’t detect anything overtly dangerous. I’ll have to take some tissue samples and run an analysis to figure out what species it is. It certainly doesn’t look like anything we have on Earth.” She picked up a pair of tweezers, then grasped the claw with her other hand to hold it steady. “Oh!” she gasped softly.

“What?” Jack looked from her to the claw. “What’s ‘oh’ mean?”

“I just wasn’t expecting it to feel the way it does.” She stroked a finger across one of the toes. “It’s incredibly soft. Like velvet. Go on, feel it.”

Jack shrugged and touched the claw, but after a second he grimaced and jerked his hand away. “ _Yech,_ I don’t like that at all. It just feels… _wrong_.” He shuddered.

Toshiko looked surprised. “I didn’t know you had any texture sensitivities, Jack.”

“I don’t, normally. But something about that thing…” He crossed his arms and eased back a step. “I don’t know what it is, exactly. I just don’t like it.”

Gwen moved closer, propelled by curiosity. She tentatively poked at the claw, then rubbed it between her fingers. “Ooh, I’m with Tosh. It’s like buttery soft leather.” She grinned over at Ianto. “That’s lovely, that is. I’d wear that as a coat.”

“I don’t think it would cover much of you,” Ianto deadpanned. He glanced at Jack, who was just frowning faintly at the thing on the desk and didn’t seem concerned about the others handling it, then reached across the desk to touch the claw. It _was_ soft—a bit smoother than suede, but supple and almost warm to the touch. As he ran his fingers over it, the warmth seemed to move into his arm, relaxing the perpetual knots in his shoulders…

“Any more of that and we’ll have to give teaboy and his pet hand a private room,” Owen groused. “Tosh, run your tests, if you can do it without getting hot under the collar. Let me know if I need to perform a necropsy or anything.” He took his coffee and headed for the medical bay, pausing only to scoop up the coat that had landed on the stairs.

Ianto relinquished the claw to Toshiko and returned to his duties, collecting the garbage around the Hub, washing the empty mugs, and filing a few stray reports. Gwen went back to monitoring the police band for suspicious incidents, and Jack returned to his office.

Less than an hour had passed when Toshiko called, “Got it!”

Jack leaned out of his office. “Got what?”

“An ID on our mysterious claw.” She pointed to a monitor. “I didn’t expect to find a match so quickly, but the DNA was already in our database.”

The others gathered around Toshiko’s workstation, Jack leaning over her chair to read the screen. “A Zagrith?”

“That’s what it says.” Toshiko toggled the file to display the entire entry. “There isn’t much information on them, but apparently the DNA is a match.”

“What the hell is a Zagrith?” Jack went on. “I’ve never heard of them.”

Toshiko frowned. “Are you sure? The file creation date is 2001. You were here then, weren’t you?”

Ianto squinted at the screen. “Tosh, can you enlarge that code in the corner?” She did so, and Ianto read through the string of numbers. “That’s a four-four-three.”

“The first three digits? Yes.” Toshiko twisted in her chair to look up at him. “Does that mean something to you?”

“It means this isn’t a Torchwood Three file. It must be one of the files I imported from the Torchwood One database. They used a different classification system than we do.”

“I guess that explains why Jack didn’t know about it, then,” Gwen said practically.

Jack was watching Ianto’s face closely. “Ianto, is there something else you want to share? You don’t look as happy as you usually do when you get to talk about filing systems.”

Ianto couldn’t summon the levity to respond to his wisecrack. “Four-four-three was never anything good. It was generally used to designate something that had resulted in the death of one or more Torchwood employees.”

Owen shrugged. “So it’s a dangerous species. Not surprising, given its fingernails. But I don’t think this one’s likely to go after anybody.”

“Four-four-three isn’t a species code,” Ianto countered. “Species were classified under five-two. Weaponry was seven-six-five. The four-four category was only used for things like inert artifacts, or objects we couldn’t identify.”

“Well, I’ve tested it for radiation, microbes, and disease agents,” Toshiko said. “Negative on all three. The only bacteria present are the same kind you’d find on any surface in this room; they probably got there from people touching it. Apart from its skin texture making Jack slightly uncomfortable, and the fact that it’s obviously part of a dead alien, I can’t find anything particularly wrong with it.” She shrugged. “Maybe it just happens to share a species origin with whatever dangerous thing washed up at Torchwood One.”

“Maybe,” Ianto murmured. He wasn’t convinced.

Neither, it seemed, was Jack. “Well, now that we’ve identified it, let’s get that thing packed away in long-term storage. I know it’s the week of Halloween and all, but I’d rather not have _actual_ mummy parts decorating the Hub.”

“I’ll go get a containment box,” Ianto offered, turning toward the archives.

He had taken only a few steps when an alarm shrieked from Toshiko’s computer. “Rift alert!” she cried, rapidly toggling screen displays to discover the source.

Owen reappeared at the top the stairs. “Finally! Where is it, Tosh?”

“Directly above us. It’s small, but—” Toshiko cut in a feed from a ground-level security camera. “Oh, no—there are people up there, Jack!”

Jack, already wearing his pistol, bolted for the invisible lift and activated it with his wrist strap. He shouted orders as he rose into the air. “Owen, Gwen, get weapons from the armory and meet me up there. Ianto, get the Retcon ready and follow us. Tosh, keep monitoring, and take care of the camera feeds.”

They raced to their assignments. Owen and Gwen dashed through the cog door and took the lift to the tourist office while Ianto was still scouring the shelves for a supply of their shortest-term memory modification drugs. By the time he followed, pill bottle and stack of paper cups in hand, the lift was at surface level. Ianto started toward the stairs, then hesitated. The lift wouldn’t take long to return to the Hub level, and it wasn’t as though they needed him right away; he was just following to deal with the civilian witnesses. After all, he thought, twenty seconds one way or another wouldn’t make much difference.

Ianto had rarely been so wrong.

He emerged onto the Plass just in time to see Jack’s body strike the ground. Nearby, Owen and Gwen were pumping rounds of ammunition into a bulbous, brown-skinned biped with barracuda teeth. _Hoix_ , Ianto’s brain supplied belatedly. In the strident glare of the streetlights, red blood dripped ominously from the creature’s fingers and jaw. Ianto didn’t need to see the darker, more viscous fluid burst from each bullet wound to know whose blood the alien was spattered with.

The Hoix quickly succumbed to the barrage of fire, and Ianto scarcely spared it a glance as he moved to Jack’s side. His stomach lurched as he knelt beside the mangled body. Jack’s chest had been torn open by the alien’s claws, ribs pulled out of place and vital organs trailing across the pavement. A bite-sized chunk of Jack’s throat was missing, and blood flowed down toward the bay in a gruesome river.

Behind him, Gwen and Owen hastily rolled the dead Hoix onto the invisible lift. Owen swore under his breath as he surveyed the perimeter. “Dammit, they’ve all got mobiles out. There’s gonna be video of this whole thing on the internet in two minutes if we don’t get moving. Ianto, you need to get Retcon into those people, _stat._ ” Ianto didn’t move. “Ianto!” Owen hissed, punctuating the word with a none-too-gentle slap on the shoulder. “Quit moping and move! Jack’ll be fine, he always is. We’ll sweep up the pieces. Now get off your arse and do your bloody job!”

“It’s fine,” Gwen said quickly, pocketing her pistol and kneeling beside Ianto. “Ianto, love, let me have the Retcon. And the cups, too. There. You stay with Jack, all right? Help Owen get him downstairs.”

Owen rolled his eyes as Gwen hurried toward the ring of onlookers, announcing something about a special open-air horror production and free Halloween candy samples, but the doctor quickly seized Jack’s ankles and dragged his remains onto the invisible lift beside the Hoix. A trail of gore followed the body. “I don’t suppose you’d be a good chap and grab that lung for me?” Owen drawled, pointing to a hunk of bloody tissue near Ianto’s foot.

Ianto took two steps, fell to his knees, and vomited.

* * *

A warm mug pressed against Ianto’s palm. He looked up to find Toshiko giving him a sympathetic smile. “Ginger tea,” she explained. “It helps settle the stomach.”

“Thanks,” Ianto mumbled. He sipped the hot, bitter liquid, more to be polite than because he wanted it. He knew he probably looked worse than he felt; he’d always been left a little pale and shaky after being sick, though he was more humiliated at his own reaction than anything. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t seen Jack die before. Violently. Dozens of times.

Gwen joined them after stowing her weapon in the armory. She sat on the couch beside Ianto, put an arm around his shoulders and gave a reassuring squeeze. “He’ll be all right.”

“I know.” Ianto wrapped his hands around the mug and soaked up its warmth. “Thanks for… up there.”

Gwen nodded. “I know you’d rather be with Jack.”

“I think Jack prefers that, too,” Toshiko added. “He always looks for you first when he wakes up.”

Ianto cast an unwilling glance toward the medical bay, where the pieces of Jack’s body had been collected and piled on a gurney. “I’ll go down in a little while and sit with him. I think it’s going to take a bit longer than usual for him to recover.” He took another sip of the tea, then set the mug on the coffee table and stood. “Besides, I should go deal with that Hoix before it gets too ripe.”

Owen, passing on his way to the medical bay, lingered near the top step. “Don’t bother. I already took care of it.”

Ianto stared at him in surprise. “You did?”

“Yeah.” Owen looked anywhere other than Ianto. “I had stuff to do down there anyway.”

“Oh.” Ianto recognized the apology buried in the doctor’s fidgeting. At least Owen had realized what an arse he’d been up on the Plass. “Um, thanks.”

“It’s fine,” Owen mumbled. “I’m just… gonna… clean up downstairs. I’ll let you know when Jack’s back in one piece.” He vanished down the steps.

“Will wonders never cease,” Gwen said, too quietly for her voice to carry to the lower level. “There may be hope for our Dr. Harper yet.”

“He has his moments.” Toshiko crossed to her workstation and checked the rift monitor. “It’s been totally quiet ever since that one alien dropped through. I don’t want to jinx us, but I think we’re probably looking at another peaceful night—at least as far as the rift is concerned. We can probably pack up for the evening.”

“On the topic of packing up, don’t forget we still have to put away our little friend here.” Gwen crossed to Toshiko’s desk and tapped the claw, which was still sitting where they’d left it. As soon as Gwen’s fingertip touched it, her hands seemed to gravitate toward it, and she picked it up.

“And I’m not going anywhere until Jack’s back among the living.” Ianto glanced over the rail into the medical bay, then stepped back with a shudder; Jack’s chest was still laid open. “Which could be a while.”

“Of course,” Toshiko amended quickly. “I naturally assumed we’d all stay at least until Jack woke up.” She glanced at Gwen, who was absently stroking the mummified claw. “Is that fun?”

Gwen blinked down at the claw and laughed at herself. “You know, it _is_ sort of soothing. It’s that soft texture, I think. It’s like petting a kitten or something.” She carried it over to Ianto. “Here, Ianto, you’d better take this and stow it in the archives before I adopt it. I think Rhys is probably allergic to mummified aliens.”

“I doubt Jack would approve the adoption, either.” Ianto tried to smile, but the effort hurt. As Gwen put the claw into his hands, he looked over the railing again. As horrible as it was, there was something morbidly fascinating about the way Jack’s body was reassembling itself. Though the recovery process happened almost too slowly to observe, there was visible progress minute to minute: Jack’s shattered ribs had found their way back into their proper positions, and new tissue swelled beneath them, regrowing the heart and lung that had been torn from his chest. Every so often Owen, working at his station below, checked his status.

Gwen grimaced as she followed Ianto’s gaze. “It’s awful, isn’t it? Seeing him like that.”

Ianto leaned on the railing, his fingers roving absently over the soft object in his hands. “Especially knowing what he goes through every time. All the agony he endures when he dies… it happens on the way back, too. He has to feel it all twice. Watching him die is horrible, but waiting for him to wake up is almost worse. Knowing what’s coming, what he’s about to experience.” He tried to smile again, and failed. “Not that I don’t want him to wake up, because of course I do. I just mean…” He bit his lip and fought down the sudden tightness in his throat.

Gwen flashed him an understanding smile. “I know. You hate seeing him in pain. We all do.”

Ianto’s eyes strayed to Jack’s body again. “I wish he didn’t have to suffer any more.”

There was a _snap_ and a sudden, sharp pain in Ianto’s hand. He cried out and doubled over. Gwen hovered beside him, eyes wide. “Ianto, what’s wrong? Are you ill?”

“Ianto?” Toshiko hurried over from her desk. “Look! His hand!” One of the curved talons had snapped down toward the center of the claw, pinning Ianto’s hand beneath it. Toshiko seized Ianto’s wrist and braced it. “Gwen, pull! Get it off him!”

Owen left Jack’s body and hurried up the stairs. “What the hell’s going on up here?”

“Owen, help me with this!” Gwen ground out, straining against the claw. “I can’t shift it!”

“Hold on.” Owen hurried downstairs and returned with a set of steel forceps, which he used as a lever to pry the talon up just far enough for Ianto to twist his hand free. Blood welled up from the puncture it had made in his skin, and a drop fell in the center of the mummified claw—and vanished in a puff of vapor.

Gwen stared at the thing in her hands, mesmerized for a few seconds, before she realized what she was holding and tossed it away. It rocked to a halt on the metal grating, still balanced perfectly upright—only now one of the three curved talons was folded down. “What,” she panted, “the _hell_?”

“It must have had some kind of hidden mechanism,” Toshiko said. “Ianto, did you feel something trigger? A button, a switch, anything?”

Ianto shook his head. “I hardly even knew I was holding it. It just stabbed me all of a sudden.”

Gwen reached for his hand. “Are you hurt badly?”

“Not really. I think I was more startled than anything.” Ianto examined his hand. Fortuitously, the claw had struck one of his knuckles, rather than landing in the soft tissue between them. The cut was ragged and bleeding, but it appeared superficial. “It stings like hell, but it’s not very deep.”

“Well, come down and let’s get it cleaned out, anyway,” Owen said. “God only knows where that thing’s been, and the last thing we need is you coming down with space gangrene.”

Ianto rolled his eyes as he followed Owen down the stairs. “Once again, Dr. Harper exhibits his inimitable bedside manner.”

Owen retrieved a bottle of saline rinse and aimed it pointedly into Ianto’s cut. “Most of my patients don’t complain.”

“That’s because most of your patients are dead.” Ianto deliberately kept his eyes fixed on the bottle so he wouldn’t be tempted to look at Jack, who was lying almost within arm’s reach.

“Exactly. My autopsies and necropsies get five-star reviews. It’s just the odd living patient who gets picky about their treatment.” Owen swabbed disinfectant into the wound, then folded a square of gauze over it and taped it down. “Now, you keep a close eye on that. You get any redness, heat, swelling, you let me know _immediately_. Hand wounds are way more dangerous than most people think. Infection gets into a tendon sheath, and you’re done.”

“Noted.” With no other object to focus on, Ianto couldn’t stop his gaze from creeping toward Jack. The motionless body looked surreal: Jack’s flesh was eerily pale, and the blood spattered over his skin had already dried a rusty brown. The contrast was unsettling, to say the least. “How’s Jack?” Ianto asked, then amended the question before Owen could answer it in the most literal and obvious way. “Any idea how long it will be before he wakes up?”

“Well, judging by the rate of tissue restoration…” Owen moved to the side of Jack’s gurney and stopped. “Huh. That’s strange.”

Ianto willed himself to remain calm. Doubtless, this was Owen setting up to take the mickey in some new way. “What is?”

“Give me a second.” Owen fetched a set of calipers from a tray and measured something within Jack’s chest cavity. Then he looked at his watch, counting seconds, and checked Jack’s chest again. “Um.” He glanced at Ianto, then gave a shrug that didn’t seem quite natural. “I think it’s going to be a while yet. Why don’t you go make us all a round of coffee, since it looks like we’re in for the long haul? I’ll let you know in a bit how he’s coming along.”

Ianto’s uneasy feeling did not subside as he prepared and delivered the requested beverages, and it only deepened as he straightened Jack’s office—a task that usually calmed him in its quiet intimacy, as he cared for the things Jack used and cherished. Now, the half-completed paperwork on Jack’s blotter only reminded Ianto that their fearless leader was lying cold and partially disemboweled in the lower level.

After three quarters of an hour, Ianto had run out of mechanical tasks with which to occupy himself, and was on the verge of going up to the tourist office to organize the coupon books when he heard Owen’s voice ring across the Hub. “So, um, we need to have a chat.”

Gwen looked up from her desk. “Who?”

“All of us.” Owen’s gaze reluctantly wound its way to Ianto. “You’ll want to sit down for this.”

Gwen and Toshiko wheeled their desk chairs nearer, and Ianto sat gingerly at the edge of the sofa. “What are we chatting about, then?”

Owen moistened his lips and looked around the group before answering. “Jack’s not healing.”

“What do you mean, not healing?” Gwen glanced at Toshiko and Ianto, then back to Owen, a nervous smile hovering uncertainly about her lips. “He’s Jack. He—he _always_ heals.”

“He always has before.” Owen plunged his hands into the pockets of his white coat. “But something’s different this time. His body’s stopped putting itself back together. I don’t know why.”

“So what does that mean?” Ianto’s voice sounded artificially flat and controlled to his own ears, giving no indication of the panic compressing his lungs. “He’ll wake up without being fully healed?”

Owen’s shoulders rose and fell, but there was nothing casual about the gesture. “I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s going to wake up. I don’t know how his body works normally, or why it’s changed. Maybe he’s finally just run out of lives.” A little frustration bled into his tone as he added, “If Jack weren’t so bloody secretive…”

“But he _was_ healing,” Toshiko cut him off. “We all saw it. Why would it suddenly stop?”

“All I know is that there was new tissue growth at a consistent rate every time I checked, up until there wasn’t.”

“So it wasn’t a gradual process. So… so there had to be a cause. Something acute. Something that changed.” Toshiko’s cheeks were a touch more pale than usual, but Ianto could see her analytical mind working, grasping at facts, keeping the frightening possibilities at bay. “Maybe something environmental. Did you see anything different?”

Owen spread his hands. “I wasn’t even down there. It was after we were all trying to get that claw thing off Ianto’s hand. When I went back to check on Jack, everything had stopped.”

Gwen’s brow furrowed, and she twisted to look at the claw, which they’d scooped up with a dustpan and set aside for further examination. “You don’t suppose… Could they be related?”

Toshiko followed her gaze. “You mean whatever affected Jack might have triggered that thing somehow?”

“Or the other way around.” Gwen wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s the only thing I can think of. I can’t believe Jack could just…” She bit her lower lip.

“Jack can’t die,” Ianto said with as much conviction as he could muster. “Tosh is right; there has to be a reason. We figure out what it is, we solve it, we get Jack back.”

Owen blew out a long breath. “Okay. I’ll keep working on Jack. See if there’s something I can do to jump-start his system. I’ll leave the creepy mummy hand to you.”

Toshiko met the three pairs of eyes fixed on her with an uncertain gaze. “I suppose we can’t rule anything out, but it’s just correlation at this point. I’ve already run every standard test on that thing and came up with nothing.”

“Then let’s come up with some non-standard ones,” Gwen said. “ _Something_ had to make it move, right?”

For the next hour, Ianto drifted anxiously between the medical bay, the workstations, and the kitchenette, carrying messages and coffee and grasping at every slender thread of hope he could glean from the others’ work. There just wasn’t enough for him to _do_ —nothing he could contribute to bring Jack back any faster, and no way for him to speed up Toshiko’s tests or Owen’s experiments. From time to time he relieved Gwen as she diligently slogged through Torchwood’s regular work monitoring the city, but the rift remained quiet.

Ianto had finally resigned himself to sitting in the medical bay, holding Jack’s clammy, stiff hand—unsettling though it was, now that livor mortis was setting in—when Toshiko called for them to gather at her station. Ianto nearly tripped as he bolted up the stairs. “You have something, Tosh?” he asked, not caring how desperate he sounded.

“Maybe.” Toshiko pointed to a waveform displayed on one of her monitors. “I couldn’t find any reason for this thing to have moved the way that it did, so after I exhausted all the chemical and mineral analyses, I decided to treat it like a living creature and subject it to some of the tests we use on alien life forms.”

Gwen peered at the screen. “That’s a psychic field, isn’t it?”

Toshiko nodded. “Just a low-level one. But it might explain why Jack had such a different reaction when he touched it. He’s always been more resistant to psychic interference than the rest of us.”

Gwen frowned. “So this thing was broadcasting a psychic signal that—what, exactly? Read our minds? Manipulated us in some way?”

Toshiko looked up at her. “You _were_ carrying it around and petting it.”

“And you people say _my_ hobbies are weird,” Owen muttered.

Ianto ignored him. “So what has this psychic field got to do with Jack’s healing ability?” Despite the abundant evidence in the medical bay, he still couldn’t bring himself to speak of Jack’s death. Not when it could be permanent.

“I don’t know.” Toshiko rubbed her eyes. “I don’t even know that it does, for certain. But it’s the first progress we’ve made.”

“Well, you’re ahead of me.” Owen’s tone was sour. “Jack’s still as dead as he was an hour ago. Nothing I’ve tried has made a bit of difference.”

Gwen was staring at the claw, her expression thoughtful. “Hang on. There’s something strange about this thing…”

Toshiko’s eyebrows rose. “You’re only realizing that _now_?”

“No, I mean… the psychic field it’s projecting. Why would it make us want to touch it? What’s its goal?”

“What makes you think it’s got one?” Owen gave her a skeptical look. “It’s an alien foot. Not even a whole one. Not sure it has much in the way of aspirations.”

“No, wait—I think Gwen’s on to something.” Ianto closed his eyes and thought back to the moments before the thing had clamped down on his hand. Gwen had carried it over to him, and… “When I was holding it, I felt sort of… relaxed. Open. I said things I normally wouldn’t have. I think.” He frowned. “Actually, I’m not entirely clear on what I said while I was holding it. It’s all a bit hazy.”

“You were talking about Jack.” Gwen glanced toward the observation platform where they’d been standing. “You talked about the way it made you feel, seeing him die, and you said that…” She trailed off, and a second later her eyes stretched wide. “Oh my god.”

“What?” Toshiko looked from Gwen to Ianto. “What’s wrong?”

“Ianto, you said that waiting for Jack to come back to life was worse than watching him die.” She turned to him with a stricken expression. “You said you wished that Jack’s suffering would end.”

It took Ianto a moment to follow her logic, but when he finally grasped her meaning, the strength drained from his limbs. He sagged against Toshiko’s desk even as he denied the possibility. “But not like this,” he stammered. “I would never have meant it like _this_. And… and besides, like Owen said, it’s just a—a foot! A dried-up old claw! And it was nowhere near Jack, and it certainly couldn’t have switched off his immortality! Right, Tosh?” He threw her a desperate glance.

Toshiko hesitated an instant too long before answering, and Ianto’s stomach plummeted. “It’s very unlikely,” she hedged. “Well, that is—I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t have any way of measuring this thing’s capability. All we know is that it operates on some psychic level…”

“Hey, what if we’re all just hallucinating this?” Owen put in. “If it really is messing with our heads, what if this is all an illusion that this thing is making us see? What if we only _think_ that Jack’s dead?”

Toshiko frowned. “The field I picked up isn’t nearly that strong. For it to affect all of us over such a broad area…”

“Okay, but what if you only _think_ you picked up a weak signal?” Owen pressed. “Maybe it’s doing a number on all of us.”

Toshiko rooted around under her desk for a moment, then lifted a piece of equipment that looked like a cross between a cake dome and an antique vacuum tube out of a storage crate. She used a pencil to knocked the claw into the base of the transparent device and clamped down the lid. “Tensor insulator,” she explained. “It should effectively cancel out any field that thing is generating—electrical, magnetic, psychic, or gravitational. Check and see.”

Owen went to the medical bay and looked down. “Bollocks,” he muttered. “Jack’s the same.”

“There is one way to know for certain whether that thing is responsible for what happened.” Gwen’s gaze was fixed on the claw, sealed inside the glass dome. “Open it, Tosh.”

“Just beware its psychic pull.” Toshiko twisted off the insulator’s cover. “What did you have in mind?” Gwen reached in and scooped up the claw, cradling it in her hands. She jerked it away when Toshiko tried to snatch it back. “Gwen, what did I _just say_?”

“It’s not affecting me,” Gwen assured her. “I’m going to test my theory.”

“Gwen, I know what you’re thinking, and don’t you dare,” Owen warned. “If by some fluke of the cosmos you’re right about that thing, it’ll probably do to you what it did to Ianto. He got lucky. _You_ might lose a finger.”

“I’ll be careful,” she promised. “This is the easiest way to know whether or not my theory is completely bonkers. Because honestly, it sounds a bit bonkers to me. And if we rule this out, then we can focus on something that has a better chance of working, right?” Before any of them could stop her, Gwen stared at the claw and declared, “I wish Jack would come back to life.”

Even though he was half expecting it, Ianto jumped as the second talon snapped down into Gwen’s hand. Her fingers were only caged loosely around the object, and she’d been prepared to drop it quickly, but the blade-sharp claw still slashed a red line along her thumb as she released it. She let out a yelp and cradled the wounded digit in her opposite hand. The blood gathered and beaded along the cut, and a single drop fell to where the claw lay on the metal grating.

The droplet sublimated on contact with the mummified flesh.

“Damn it, Gwen!” Owen growled, bumping Ianto aside as he hurried over to inspect her injury. “I warned you what could happen—”

The doctor trailed off as another sound rolled through the Hub, rendering them all into stunned silence. A wet, rasping gurgle echoed off the tiled walls and raised the hair on the back of Ianto’s neck.

In the next second Owen had abandoned Gwen and bolted back to the medical bay’s observation platform, where he caught himself against the railing. “Oh, god,” he breathed. “Oh, god, no.”

Ianto ran. Owen shouted something and threw out an arm to hold him back as he made for the stairs, but Ianto slammed it aside. _Jack_. Gwen’s mad theory had worked, Jack was alive, Jack was back, Jack was…

Ianto wasn’t fully aware of his body catching up against the safety chains ringing the stairway. Some part of him gradually realized that he was no longer moving, and wondered why; the rest of his faculties were occupied with the tableau in the medical bay, at which he stared for several seconds without comprehension.

Jack was, indeed, alive—but only in the sense that his body was moving; his animated state otherwise bore little resemblance to human life. His chest was still laid open, revealing a half-formed heart sputtering weakly behind fractured ribs. A shred of lung stretched like taffy between the spasming diaphragm and a tenuous net of connective tissue, forcing occasional bubbles of air through the tear in his throat. What blood remained fluid in his body frothed at the ends of severed arteries.

Jack’s eyes were open, but they did not move—though whether that was from a lack of cognizance or simply that no oxygen could reach the muscles necessary to control them was a question Ianto was not capable of considering just then.

For the second time that day, Ianto went to his knees and was sick.

* * *

Toshiko didn’t offer him a cup of ginger tea. When Ianto felt cold glass press against his fingers, he looked up and saw that she had carried the entire set of crystal decanters down from the briefing room. The glass in his hand contained three fingers of scotch. He took it with a nod of thanks.

Beside Ianto on the sofa, Gwen dutifully accepted her medicine, as well. She swiped the tears from her cheeks before throwing back the liquor, but they were quickly replaced with fresh ones.

None of them could speak. None of them needed to.

After several minutes, they heard Owen’s leaden tread ascending the stairs. He dragged Gwen’s desk chair over and slumped into it. “I could use one of those, Tosh,” he rasped.

She poured three servings of bourbon whiskey into a glass and handed it to him. It took her a few false starts before she managed, “How is he?”

Owen drained half the glass and grimaced before answering. “He’s still not healing.”

Gwen buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Ianto put a comforting arm around her, more out of habit than sympathy. In the time since Owen had scraped him off the stairs and half-carried him up here, he had gone completely numb, his emotions as frozen as the cubes of ice that bobbed in his scotch.

He’d felt this detached once before, he recalled. Canary Wharf. Lisa.

“I tried giving him a sedative,” Owen went on, “but without a circulatory system, it’s not much use.” The doctor stared into the amber liquid in his hand. “He’s just stuck like that. Not living, not dying. There’s nothing I can do.”

Silence fell over the group. Toshiko sipped her drink and refilled Owen’s. Gwen cried. Ianto stared at the water rippling down the tower in the center of the Hub.

After several minutes, Toshiko set down her glass. “I’ve been thinking. That thing has three claws. That means we likely have one more chance to put this right.”

“You think you can trick the genie in the bottle into giving you more wishes?” Owen bared his teeth and put down another slug of bourbon. “I have a feeling that thing would find a way to screw you no matter _what_ you asked for.”

“I think so, too,” Toshiko said. “That’s why we need to be extra careful. Our last wish—if you want to call it that—needs to be a total reset. No room for error.”

Gwen scrubbed at her tear-puffed eyes. “What, like wishing we hadn’t made the first wish?”

Toshiko shook her head. “Before that. We need to somehow divert this thing before it ever made it into the Hub.”

Owen frowned. “I’m no expert, but couldn’t that cause some kind of temporal fallout?”

“A causal loop,” Ianto supplied. He drank some more scotch just to feel the burn in his throat. “Potentially devastating time paradox if we get it wrong.”

“We won’t. If we do this right, we can change the past so that Owen never makes contact with it. That would just negate everything that happened here. It won’t be a causal loop, because it never would have come to us in the first place.” Toshiko moistened her lips. “At least, I think that’s how it should work. Jack’s really the expert on paradoxes, but…”

“Let’s do it.” Owen slammed his glass down on the coffee table. “Screw the world. It’s not like it’ll last very long without Jack saving it every few weeks anyway.”

“Agreed,” Gwen said. “I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t try to put this right.”

“Fine by me.” Ianto got to his feet, wobbling a little as several glasses of hard liquor hit his too-empty stomach. “I’ll be downstairs.”

While the others debated what wording to use for their final wish, Ianto descended to the medical bay. Owen had covered Jack up to the chin with a sheet, but while it helped conceal the travesty of his body, it did nothing to mute the sound of his abortive breathing. Numbed as he was, Ianto could no longer summon the energy to be horrified by it. He bent and kissed Jack’s cold forehead—a more public demonstration of affection than he once would have chanced within the Hub, but he no longer cared who saw. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and then—because there was a slim chance that Jack had somehow remained conscious through all of this, and if the world really were about to end, it seemed a good time to say it—“I love you.”

Toshiko soon descended the stairs to join him, followed by Gwen and Owen. She held the claw securely between her hands, one finger positioned in the center for the blood sacrifice they assumed was required. The others took up positions around Jack’s gurney, each brushing an arm or touching a hand, leaving Ianto to stand at Jack’s head.

“Ready?” Toshiko asked. At Ianto’s nod, she held the claw aloft. “I wish that the family in Penarth who found this alien claw in their child’s candy bag had immediately thrown it out into the bay, where it sank straight to the bottom.”

There was a _snap_ and a hiss of pain from Toshiko, and as Ianto watched, the bright drop of blood from her finger struck the mummified claw and curled into vapor.

* * *

It was a typical golden morning in October—the latest in a string of unseasonably uneventful days for Torchwood Three. A little of the crisp autumn chill had crept into the air of the Hub, and Ianto Jones, preparing the team’s morning round of caffeinated bliss, chafed his hands and extended his fingers toward the heat of the coffee machine. He was grateful that his duties frequently put him in close proximity to a reliable source of warmth. _Two_ sources, if you counted Jack’s superhuman metabolism. Warmth of an entirely different sort flushed through Ianto’s chest as he recalled all the ways Jack had warded off the chill the previous night.

Ianto was just adding the cream to Gwen’s mug when the cog door rolled back with its usual fanfare of alarms and flashing lights. Owen strode into the Hub, brandishing a plastic carrier bag. “Well, Halloween has finally kicked off,” he announced to the room at large. “You will not _believe_ where I found this thing…”


End file.
